Intel Core i9 12900K and Core i5 12600K review: storm's here

Intel’s 12th-gen desktop processors promise a dramatic leap forward, courtesy of the long-awaited shift to a modern 10nm process, dubbed Intel 7, and a radical new hybrid design that echoes Apple’s powerful M1 chips. It’s the most exciting Intel release for years, and it comes at the perfect time: just as AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors prised the gaming crown (and significant market share) from Team Blue.

We’ve been testing the $589 Core i9 12900K and $289 Core i5 12600K for the past week against their 11th-gen predecessors and AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors, and have come away impressed with what Intel has accomplished here. However, all this horsepower comes with a cost – and we’re not sure that 12th-gen makes sense for everyone just yet. In this review, we’ll explain the gaming performance you can expect, explore the new features of the Z690 platform and everything else you need to know.

Before we get into the results, let’s take a brief look at Intel’s new Alder Lake architecture. As we established in our Intel 12th-gen announcement article, the new CPUs come with both high-speed ‘Performance’ and lower power ‘Efficient’ cores. The idea is that Intel’s Thread Director and the Windows 11 OS work together to put performance-critical gaming or content creation tasks on the P cores, while background tasks like updates or streaming run on the E cores.

The flagship 12900K comes with eight P cores and eight E cores, with each P core also offering hyper-threading for a grand total of 16 cores and 24 threads. The processors also come with a larger L3 cache, mirroring a move AMD made with its Ryzen 5000 processors that boosted gaming performance significantly. With all things combined – the move to 10nm, the new architecture, new cache and max turbo boosts of up to 5.2GHz – Intel has promised performance gains of up to 20 percent for gaming and up to 30 percent for content creation – far beyond the usual single-digit performance gains we’ve come to expect.